In a video recording of an earlier interview with the committee, Hutchinson was shown describing her boss, then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, discussing the āHang Mike Penceā chants of the Capitol insurrectionists with then-White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.
āI remember Pat saying something to the effect of, āMark, we need to do something more, theyāre literally calling for the vice president to be fāing hung,āā Hutchinson said, āand Mark had responded something to the effect of, āYou heard him, Pat, he thinks Mike deserves it, he doesnāt think theyāre doing anything wrong.ā To which Pat said something, āThis is fāing crazy, we need to be doing something more.āā
Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney segued out of that video, saying, āLet me pause here on this point. As the rioters chanted āHang Mike Pence,ā the president of the United States, Donald Trump, said that, quote, āMike deserves it,ā and that those rioters were not doing anything wrong.ā
Cheney went on to air a clip of a Trump interview with ABC Newsā Jonathan Karl, in which he responded to a question specifically about the āHang Mike Penceā chants by saying:
āBecause itāsāitās common sense, Jon, itās common sense, that youāre supposed to protect. How can youāif you know a vote is fraudulent, rightāhow can you pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress?ā
Trumpās pivot away from the chant to his anger at Pence showed that, yes, he supported those chants. As did his 2:24 PM tweet on Jan. 6, next flagged by Cheney:
āMike Pence didnāt have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!ā
But while both of these earlier public statements from Trump told anyone who was willing to hear it what they needed to know about his response, there were still people out thereāprominent peopleāgiving Trump the benefit of the doubt on his response to āHang Mike Pence.ā Hutchinsonās testimony has to pull some of those people off the fence of denial.
Donald Trump didnāt think the mob violently attacking the U.S. Capitol was doing anything wrong, even when they expressed a desire to murder his own second-in-command, a man who had spent more than four years lavishly tongue-bathing him, because on this one thing Pence had reluctantly concluded he had to follow the law rather than Trumpās wishes. Hutchinsonās account of the conversation between Meadows and Cipollone shows how explicit Trumpās reaction wasāit might have been thinly veiled when he talked to Karl, but it wasnāt when he talked to his top aides in the momentāand the degree to which everyone around him knew it.